It's not marked as a group quest. (Oh, so it's soloable.)
However, it is located deep in group quest territory, surrounded by elite mobs and a big bad boss that comes with his own enrage timer at low health. (Oh, so it's not soloable.)
Yet, after following various groups of varying success through this group quest territory named in standard WoW English as "BC" aka Black Claw Outpost/Village, my guild group shows me what is apparently an open secret during Aion's closed/open beta. You can actually dodge past just a few elites, climb up a cliff, and GLIDE nearly all the way to the boss' cave entrance. It just takes a shortcut hugging walls, through waters that threaten to drown you at a certain point, but can be offset with a potion, or a pocket healer.
As I later find out in my solo exploration experiments, a gladiator's charge speed increase also gets one past with very little problems. The rest of the elites can be avoided through some clever use of scenery, and a desperate charge speed increase past one lonely elite guard who gives up the pursuit a little way into the cave. Which thankfully has enough open space to cower and hide without training 15 mobs accidentally in a painful NPC gank exercise. From there, it's a simple hug-the-wall exercise to the Abyss Gate you're supposed to click to enter the quest instance.
(Oh, so Crushing the Conspiracy is soloable, after all!)
Except when I click the Abyss Gate, it tells me that this area is only open to people in a group. Hardcoded. No way round it. Gotta be in a group. Period.
(WTF. So it's NOT soloable, after all.)
I sit around cooling my heels for a while, wondering if I have enough gall to blind invite someone for the length of time needed to click/operate the Abyss Gate. Turns out I'm a wuss and can't bring myself to. I try an appeal to my guild, but it's kinda 1am my time and 3am theirs - there's only two not very responsive people on, at higher levels, so I feel bad disturbing them.
It's kinda my dumbass fault I'm in this mess anyway because I'd gotten in a guild group there, entered the instance with someone else, killed the stuff, clicked one item, killed the boss, FORGOT to click the last item, and walked out again to find that my quest reset. So I was kinda embarassed to go in again in front of them and thought I'd do the cunning solo thang later - it's more story-cool that way anyhow.
Fortunately, being in the start of the Aion launch means there's plenty of groups forming for all kinds of things, as long as I stay roughly equivalent levels. Tons of them are looking for "BC" but I don't have the heart to get myself in under false pretences, I don't want to do ALL of the BC quests, I just want a group for 10 seconds so I can click the damn gate, waltz in and pwn my quest.
Which, by the way, I can do, because the mobs INSIDE the instance are not elite. And eminently pullable one by one. Which makes it a bloody fun solo challenge.
(Oh, so it IS soloable, after all.)
Except I need to be in a group to unlock the zone-into-instance mechanism.
(Fail. So I need a group. For all of ten seconds.)
I utterly fail to get any sympathy from random other groupies who are running around the open dungeon concept elite area, waiting for the big bad boss to spawn on a ~1h timer. All the PUGs are probably full anyway to get to this point, or just a mono-guild type of group who wouldn't welcome outsiders.
Eventually, luck falls in my direction and I see a group on the LFG channel forming who want to kill warlocks - which are elites just near the Abyss Gate I'm trying to get open. The quest (aptly labeled 'group' by the way) just requires 3 warlocks, so it's pretty easy IF you can get in here.
I shoot a tell off to the leader and offer to help them kill warlocks, I just need the group to finish off my Crushing the Conspiracy quest.
The invite wings its way over. I smash the right-click, and voila, in the space of a progress bar, I'm in. Even though the rest of my groupmates are several miles away with 50 elites in between us.
Fortunately, they are a standard PUG, consisting of some with-it and some slightly clueless individuals, so they take a while to gather and get organised. I tell them that I'm inside and I'll meet them at the entrance (not specifying which exactly :P).
Then I get a blissful 5 minutes of pulling my quite-soloable but slightly increased difficulty mobs and completing the campaign quest myself. Rawr.
THE END
Naw, not quite. The group is taking a bit to get to where I am. So I innocently ask in group if they know the easy way to get here. No reply. Standard PUG. I figure that there have been SO many BC quests in the past week that they oughta know, or at least the group leader does, so I shut up and wait.
And wait. And I get bored. So I think I'll get out of the cave and meet them at the water's edge.
I do that.
They're still not here. On the map, their dots look like they've run into some trouble and are distinctly NOT heading in the slightly-exploitative shortcut's path.
Ah crud. So I think maybe I should go back around the water and see if I can get up along the beach to join them and maybe pull them out of trouble.
(I happen to be the only gladiator in the group, with no templar tank, so I am essentially MT, even though gladiators are meant to be more offtank melee DPS, and I feel oddly obliged to fulfill my 3 warlock promise before I get to go to bed.)
Alas, this is the first time I'm coming BACK in the opposite direction, and I misjudge the depth of the water. This is a stretch I normally glide over, so who knew there was a gigantic pit/hole in the scenery underwater?
I sink like a stone, flailing away, scared to go too deep because they have a damage tick timer (Who knew, angels and demons can fly, but they don't know how to swim. Water forms the boundaries of all our zones, like the war walls of CoX...)
Turns out it's not deep enough to set the tick timer going. But it is sharply sloping enough that it's too steep to climb. Shit. I jump around for a bit, trying to cliffwalk, but I'm well and thoroughly stuck.
The good news is, there's no one to see. The rest of the PUG is under heavy fire, I can observe their hp ricocheting up and down because there's two mages and two priests, essentially, and zero tanks. All I look like, is an unmoving dot on the map waiting for them. :P
They squish. Which makes it quite convenient for me to hearth back to my bind point, and ask them to rez and offer to show them the 'shortcut.'
(Not mentioning my own predicament, of course. Haha.)
The group leader, in standard PUG style, refuses to re-rez. He wants a rez from the other priest in the group - and he's just at the entrance of elite aggro central.
I'm already trying to calculate just how well I can tank two elites or more, because it's looking like I might have to. The last time I tried, I squished badly. But that was with crappy armor and one healer. Now I'm in plate, a good few levels higher, and two priests in the group (a healing cleric and a buff-style chanter)
I luck out. By the time we get there, a full group of 6 is carving their way through the elite mobs. They decide to follow this group along instead of going via the shortcut. (Looking at their PUGish tendency, I was inclined to agree, as an accidental drowning would set us all back again.)
I get by singly tanking a couple stray elites. The amount of damage 2 sorcerors and a gladiator can output is quite sick. The chanter buffs are neat enough to keep me standing. And the cleric, while having a tendency to let my hp drop to 1/4 of the bar, has a spiffy heal that shoots it back up to full, so what the heck, whatever works.
The three warlocks go down pretty quickly. Fortunately there were enough spawns of them. There were no mass aggroes, and only dual aggros which was taken care of with some sorceror cc.
I bring the party up to the Abyss Gate for a couple other members to finish the quest I just sneakily finished :P
T'was easy because there were TWO other groups of 6 in there that had destroyed practically everything.
Just as I was looking to leave, our stalwart leader declaims he needs one more special elite type. (Two of the team are in their own private instance, mind you.) There's me, a sorceror and him remaining. Ah crud. Then I notice the leader's actually a cleric.
Oh. Holy trinity. Kinda. Maybe it'll work.
His special elite type came in a pair, so the sorceror had to cc one, which I had to fight to regain aggro of afterward, but fortunately again, we smashed through them quite well, even without the other two.
All's well that ends well. Everyone got the quest they wanted done, and I fled the group shortly after.
Still. Crushing the Conspiracy's got to be the weirdest quest ever. Is it a solo quest? Is it a group quest? It can't make up its mind.
Frankly, the only part I really detested was the hardcoded limitation that said I must find a group. I wouldn't have minded a solo quest that enterprising people could sneak in to do on the backs of those who had grouped to beat up the big bad of the dungeon.
On the bright side, I suppose this sort of thing ever so gently dropkicks a person into grouping, be it with a private guild or having to negotiate the unpredictable dirty waters of a PUG.
On the minus side, I find that I don't actually like group grinding very much. If I'm out to achieve a quest objective, fine, it's like a dungeon adventure, I'll deal. But to run around in circles, killing mobs in a group, waiting for a boss to spawn so that one can kill it and gain fat loot...
Meh. It's not really for me. Especially since these elites give xp that's only slightly higher than my solo rate, and take twice as long to kill. Big bosses also tend to wipe a group, and that puts a nasty dent in my xp/money pocketbook.
*crosses out doing dungeons and stuff on 'farm' mode*
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